


A Learning Experience

by apfelgranate



Series: Gleipnir's Forging [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen, Post-Trespasser
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-24 18:42:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4930948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apfelgranate/pseuds/apfelgranate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"To regain what was lost exacts a great price. <i>You</i> know this. You paid it to repair the eluvian."</p><p>Merrill and the Dread Wolf have a talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Learning Experience

The Vir Dirthara is glorious.

The breath catches in Merrill’s throat again and again, the wonder of it, the grief permeating the open, floating halls. Fragments of spirits flit between the books, the dancing veilfire, and the memories etched in ink and blood and stone and flame. Memory, _knowledge_ , fills this place to bursting even now – so much more than the scraps the Vir’Abelasan ever deigned to give her – and she wants nothing more than to tease it from these ruins, gentle and patient and ever hungry.

But there is no time. The Dread Wolf walks briskly before her, his dusk-gray coat trailing him as a set of great, tired wings, no longer strong enough to carry their owner. She hurries to keep pace with his long, swift strides, although the wonders of the ancient library draw her eyes from their path often enough to have her stumble.

“This place…” she begins, but does not know how to continue. Fen’Harel slows but for a moment, his shoulders drawing tight and his head and ears sinking as though in agony, before he straightens again, and continues.

“It was breath-taking,” he says then, his voice carrying the words like a dirge, soft and mournful. “The collected knowledge of our people, over eons. Memories of countless elvhen—” He grows quiet.

“Much has been lost,” Merrill murmurs, to fill that sudden, bell-struck silence.

“Too much,” he agrees.

He takes her through another ruined palace fragment, until they reach a room that is humming with as much restless magic as the one through which they entered… There, nestled between broken, overfull bookshelves, stands an eluvian. _Her_ eluvian.

Fen’Harel strokes one hand across its surface, a whispered word, a flare of magic, and the eluvian’s surface comes to life, glowing and shifting with dawn’s colors; gentle blue and pink and yellow, blown through with white.

Something bitter and wickedly painful twists in Merrill’s chest. How long had she spent to repair it? How much had she sacrificed, how much had the world taken from her for a blank mirror that never whispered, never opened, never—

She pushes the thoughts away. No place for that, not here, not now. Regret and guilt are useless, unless they compel to do differently. She intends to do differently. She intends to do _better_.

“How did you fix it?” she asks, caution keeping her words short and quiet. The Dread Wolf turns to her, and the weight of his gaze snaps her spine ramrod-straight. There is so much age beyond those eyes, but far more grief, old and new hurts, and she wonders—does he know? Does he know what is there for anyone to see who cares to look? How deep his scars run, how he walks as if the pain of the world is burning itself into his flesh with every breath?

“I did not,” is his reply. “I merely unlocked it. You have done great things, from small means.”

Merrill nods, a thick lump in her throat.

“I have a task for you,” he says. “This one is of a different make, and we must use it to benefit from the difference. You shall pass through it and move its counterpart to a more suitable position. You have—”

“How,” bubbles from her mouth, unbidden, but still she barrels on because in this place, of all places, where memories crowd so closely it feels as a shroud layered on her skin, she has to know. She has to _know_. “How did you unlock it? How can they be unlocked? Who made them, before the fall? Who made _this_ place, who fed it all these memories, who—”

He chuckles softly. “So many questions. Does the Vir’Abelasan not grant you answers?”

Merrill’s cheeks stain red with heat, and the lump in her throat grows to choke her.

“It doesn’t”, she whispers. “The voices… they refuse to speak to me since Corypheus’ fall.”

She is afraid, and he must see, he must know. Any moment, the trembling of her heart will give her fear away and as the wolf pounces upon the weak, sickly animal of the herd, he will turn his magic upon her.

But no.

He does not.

What _does_ he see?

He gives her the flash of a brittle, longing smile, there and gone as quickly as a startled butterfly. “An obstacle we shall overcome, in time. Regardless, your actions will be instrumental.”

“I want to learn,” she insists, “I have to know. Please.”

Fen’Harel turns to the eluvian once more.

“You cannot imagine what has been lost.” He hesitates. “Perhaps you can, but the loss was… Unless you had found one of the old keys, you could not have activated this eluvian. There are none left in this world who command the power to bypass those locks.”

 _Except you_ , Merrill thinks, but remains quiet. He is speaking now, letting her pull that knowledge from him on a fragile silken thread, and she does not wish to give him cause to snip it.

“There were always three parts to it. The mirrors, the paths, the keys. Their forgers were many, craftsmen who wove their spells for centuries to build the paths. The mirrors were… easier. Quicker to create, though that meant little. The keys were as manifold as the eluvians themselves – words, spells, objects. To the Evanuris, the sovereignty of their lands was paramount, and to protect it they needed the ability to seal their gates. Shut out anyone who dared to trespass… or seal in, anyone who dared to flee.”

Silence descends. It lays cold and heavy hands upon her throat and so she dares to nudge, to prompt him forward: “The library… The Vir Dirthara, is it a path as well?”

“Yes. It is perhaps the oldest. The archivists came first, but soon we realized they needed a place to remain, a place that would stand tall and secure for all ages.” He pauses; a quaking breath rattles his frame. “But without access to the Fade, it crumbled. All of it crumbled and fell to ruin.”

The heart seizes in her chest, to think, what the Vir Dirthara was before the Veil. Even now, the wealth of knowledge that could be persuaded from the ruins if only he allowed it… It is staggering. Her fingers touch her lips; she breathes deeply, and stays the words rallying on her tongue. That is not why they are here.

She inches closer, watching the curve of the Dread Wolf’s shoulders. He is tall, broad-shouldered, for an elf. He walks like a king, but here she sees how much of it is illusion. The fur he keeps slung over one shoulder, the cloak, the head held high, the usual calm of his face, it all makes him appear larger-than-life. There is an immortal god. There is a broken man.

What does he see, when he looks at her?

A child, a quickling, an agent of his will?

“Can it be rebuilt?” she asks. “Once the Veil is no more?”

“Yes. I will restore all that was.”

And, _oh_ , Merrill knows that voice. It was the voice Hawke used after their last journey to Sundermount. Her strong arms round Merrill’s heaving shoulders, her lips pressed to Merrill’s wet cheeks, over and over, like the hot, gentle touches could mend the gaping wound that was Merrill’s heart. _It will be all right. It wasn't your fault, we tried everything we could, I'm so sorry, you will survive this, you will heal, you will—_

It was the same voice that dripped from Merrill’s lips after they found Hawke’s mother. A lie, repeated often enough until maybe, one day, it became truth. Say it often enough, _I am not breaking_ , until your body learns how to stitch itself back together.

“And this world will yield.”

“That is the cost,” he says, hard and brittle and frail like old bones. “It must be paid, to restore our world. To regain what was lost exacts a great price. _You_ know this. You paid it to repair the eluvian.”

“I did,” a hollow sound that falls from her lips, as a blade upon the chopping block. “If there had been another way…”

“There wasn’t,” Fen’Harel whispers, ragged. “There is no other way this time, either.”

The eluvian’s shifting water-whorls surface glows, shines bright and its light casts deep, deep shadows. Merrill moves into the Dread Wolf’s shadow and slides her hands down to her belt, silent.

“Tell me, please,” she says, gently, though it feels like her throat is bleeding, like she is breathing sand and glass. “Tell me what you will rebuild.”

He does. The wonders of the old world: The library of all knowledge, the pathways of the eluvians, the white-spired palaces floating among the clouds, the flowers that bloomed for millennia and held entire cities, the endless song of magic from a legion spirits. His shoulders hunch, his voice is thick with pain, like the memories of what he recounts wound him somewhere deep and red.

“Oh. _Oh_ , I’m so sorry,” she breathes, and slides her knife into his back.

Part of her expected the voices of the Vir’Abelasan to howl in outrage, in shock, in _something_ —but there is only silence behind her eyes. And before her, the easy, near-quiet give of Fen’Harel’s flesh.

She didn’t know it would part so easily around the blade and she nearly pulls the knife back in surprise before it has run him through. The knife is unwieldy in her grip, it feels too big. The thought is ridiculous, her fingers close easily around the leather-wrapped grip – it is merely that it had seemed so much smaller in the hands that had given it to her: One, great and midnight-black, its fingers ending in sharp claws. The other, just as great, three-fingered, a construction of obsidian and silverite and dragonskin, shot through with the blue filigree glow of lyrium veins.

The Dread Wolf lets out a wet, gurgling noise when the hilt of the knife meets his back. He collapses, crashes forward onto his knees and hands, and Merrill follows the motion, like a piece of flotsam torn along by a great storm. The poison needs time to work, she knows, she cannot let it leave his body too soon, and so she pushes, she keeps the knife in a white-knuckle grip and lodged deep in his back.

But then he snarls, keens like a great injured beast, and throws himself around and Merrill flinches away to not be crushed under his rolling weight, and the knife rips from his back.

He is on the ground, heaving for air, red spreading on his belly, and she cannot breathe. Her legs jitter, a wonder she is still standing, and her heart beats frantic in her throat, like a caught bird. She needs—

The vials. She fumbles for the pouch at her belt, for the wool-wrapped glassworks within, freezes when Fen’Harel laughs, half-choking.

“This,” he manages, coughs, blood on his lips, on his chin. “This will not kill me, da’len.”

“I know,” she says, and her voice is _shaking_ , but it seems… It’s working, isn’t it? She would be dead by now if it wasn’t, would she not?

“I’m not here to kill you,” she says, because her throat is closing up with panic, and talking is the only thing that doesn’t make her feel as though she is choking on air. “And you’re right, I did, I did pay that price, but—”

She finally gets one of the vials free of its protective wrappings, keeps it clasped in both hands because her legs aren’t the only parts of her body gripped by an unrelenting shiver, the knife’s pommel scraping against the glass. Fen’Harel lies prone, but his chest rises and falls sharply, and he watches her, something other than the pain and the weight of ages past flickering behind his eyes.

Does he see something else, now, when he looks at her?

She shakes her head, steels her spine, and swallows around the fear locking up her throat. A step closer, and another, and Fen’Harel’s eyes track her, follow the path of her hands as she kneels down beside him. She tugs his cloak aside, bares the source of the spreading sodden red, where she pierced him clean through.

The wound looks like it might well kill him.

“ _Creators_ ,” escapes her on a hiss, years of habit behind the word. Wouldn’t that be just her luck, to kill the fabled Dread Wolf without even intending it? The thought drags a laugh from her, a bitter, cracked little thing.

Fen’Harel makes a sound, quick and choked. Merrill spares him a glance between blinks, licks her lips, her throat dry, then concentrates on her task once more. _No distractions, work fast, this is your only chance_. But still, her lips part again to spill words she has kept behind her teeth for years.

“I didn’t want to,” she says as she opens the vial and presses its mouth to the sluggish wellspring of his blood. “The price. I never—I never agreed to it. My own life, that was different, that was mine, but then.” She breaks off, remembering another knife, a dagger, _her_ dagger, in someone else’s soft, vulnerable flesh. Her eyes sting, she blinks furiously, gaze fixed on the blood that is seeping _everywhere_. All over the blade, her hands, her clothes, the ground beneath Marethari.

“I never wanted any of it,” she whispers, “she caged that demon and made me kill her, my Keeper, my entire _clan_ is dead because of me, I did it for them and then _I killed them_ —”

A sob crawls out of her throat, claws its way to freedom even though she nigh bites through her tongue to stop it.

“So, I—I understand, I know why you are in so much pain, but it’s not. I thought I’d give anything to go back, to do it differently, but not this. I was wrong about that too. You think you’ll die from how much it hurts and death would be a kindness you don’t deserve, but you can’t—you can’t.”

The first vial is nearly full. Merrill places the knife in her lap, then stoppers the vial with trembling fingers and wraps it again in the wool, her hands staining the soft threads a deep, deep red.

Abruptly, Fen’Harel croaks, his spine bows in futile motion and his breathing shifts, grows shallow.

“Oh no no no please,” she hisses, grabs his face and drags him to look at her, “Don’t die, you have to listen, _listen to me_!” His skin is hot under her palms, feverish, eyelids slid shut, but he breathes still, steady. The air flees her lungs on a great sigh.

“You can’t do this,” she tells him, carefully lines up the words on her tongue like chess pieces and moves them forward one by one. “You can’t light the world on fire because you’re in pain. You have no right.”

The Dread Wolf’s eyes flutter open. They glow.

Merrill sucks in a panicked breath, gaze darting down to his belly—his flesh is knitting back together. She drops him, scrambles for the knife, for the grip that feels too big for her fingers.

This time, he howls when the rune-and-poison-etched blade sinks into him. She clenches her eyes shut, fingers white-knuckled around the grip, panting as she waits for the howl to die away. It does, fades into broken, quiet laughter.

Merrill opens her eyes with difficulty. He is watching her again. Again, she has no hope of telling what he sees.

“You are—” he spits blood, “—quick, da’len.”

She doesn’t reply. _No distractions, work fast, this is your only chance._ The second vial is easier to open, and this time she leaves the blade where it is. Digs her fingers in against its flat side and slips the vial in-between, _I’m sorry_ tumbling from her lips like copper coins from a cut purse.

Fen’Harel keens weakly, and she can feel his torn muscles contract helplessly around the blade, her fingers, the vial. A sharp, bitter scent rises from the wound and she hurries to pull his blood inside the vial, no more time to wait for the pulse of his heart to carry it out into the open. In the Vir Dirthara, magic feels different, closer – but at the same time, unfamiliar. Fickle, unpredictable. It’s too much. It’s not enough.

As the second vial fills, a strange sort of calm spreads in Merrill’s chest, a numbness that has the violent beat of her heart echo from far away. Once full, she removes the second vial, stoppers it up again, wraps it and stows it away. She pulls out the last vial.

“You are wrong,” a hoarse whisper from a heaving chest. The Dread Wolf looks at her, all that old pain shining from his eyes ready to brand him a liar. “This is not… not for me. For my pain.”

Merrill stares at him. His cheeks are smeared with blood from her hands, from his belly. The tips of her fingers are encased in hot, bitter blood inside him, the shuddering press of his innards. Creators, he should be _screaming_.

“For the People,” she says tonelessly, “I know. You keep saying that.”

“I broke our world,” he breathes. His eyes slip shut, his head rolls back, the long stretch of his throat utterly unprotected. “I will undo my mistakes. There is no other way. No matter… no matter the cost.” It sounds like a mantra.

Merrill’s fingers twitch and she curls them around the grip of the knife to keep them still. The last vial fills, slowly. She watches the tide of red rise inside the glass, drawn in by the whisper of her magic, its surface glittering with viscera under the eluvian’s light.

“The Inquisitor—she said you saw us as though we were Tranquil, at first. She said that changed…”

She carefully removes the last vial and plugs it and stores it safely away, then gets to her feet, her joints creaking, shaking, from kneeling, unmoving, for so long. She should not linger. She should grab the knife and leap through the eluvian and destroy its other half once through. She should…

“It didn’t change, did it? Not really. You still think we’re broken,” she says, bitterness rising like bile in her chest. He’s not the only one to think so, is he? Before they fell silent, the voices of the Vir’Abelasan and their hisses of _shemlen, unworthy greedy shemlen_ —

“Because the Fade doesn’t sing to us as it does to you, because we die, because we’ve _changed_.”

He lets out a noise that could well be a sob. She looks to his face, the pain-bright eyes, the bloodied mouth, the wan color of his skin.

“If you had seen it, what you used to be,” he says, in small, gasping fragments, “you would understand.”

The bitter taste in Merrill’s mouth turns to ash, the calm in her chest disappears, and in its place blooms something sharp and burning, a great column of fire to scorch all it touches.

“No,” she bites out, “No, you do not understand. We are not broken. We could learn so much from this place, but all you see is _ruins_. You could teach us more than we could ever hope to learn from it, you could _help us_ , but instead you—you’d rather wipe the slate clean! You think you have the _right_ break us into pieces and remake us into the dead you can’t forget!”

She puts one foot forward, and then the other, and bends down to grip the knife in his belly with one hand, the other curling in his fur to drag him up to her face.

“Yes, my people have lost much. We deserve so much more than what the world grants us.” With an ugly sucking sound, the knife comes free, dripping blood. “And we deserve better still than what _you_ would give us.”

Her gaze flits down to the gaping maw of the wound, the blood soaking everywhere, the spill of his innards, and suddenly she is back in that cave on Sundermount and Marethari’s frail body is falling, fading, robbed of life by Merrill’s red-stained hand. Her pale face, leeched of the last of its color. At the foot of the mountain, the faces of her clanmates, twisted with anger and then slack in death.

She drops him as if burned. He coughs when his back hits the ground, curling in on his side with a pained groan. Her heartbeat crawls into her throat once more, and her voice cracks and breaks when she tries to speak. Her mouth is as dry as desert air.

Three tasks, Merrill remembers. They had agreed: His blood. Her words. And lastly… the Inquisitor’s message. _If time permits_ , she had said. _No distractions, work fast, this is your only chance._

He needs to understand. He _must_ understand. Merrill opens her mouth.

“If the dead are all you care for, the dead and their silence is all you’ll get in the end. I hope you understand that, Dread Wolf, before it’s too late.”

He pushes himself to his knees. A growl climbs from deep within his throat.

“Run, da’len,” he raps, “before I kill you.”

Merrill goes deathly still.

_If time permits…_

If he wanted to, she’d be dead already. If he truly intended it, she would no longer be standing, her breath her own. She clings to that thought and the shivering fury beneath her ribs, and lingers one moment more, moving to press her back against the billowing surface of the eluvian.

“The Inquisitor gave me a message for Fen’Harel. Do you not wish to hear it?”

He makes a sound as though she stabbed him again, a soft, desperate breath driven from his lungs by a sharp and slender blade. He sways on his knees, one arm wrapped tight around his middle where his blood still trickles from slowly, slowly healing gashes.

“She said to tell you—” Merrill pauses, breathes, arranges the sentence in her head. The Inquisitor’s face had been so sharp speaking the words, even sharper than when Merrill had first met her at the Winter Palace. If she stays to say them, she wants to get it right.

“—she said, ‘Watch the skies, little wolf. I have not forgotten your scent.’”

The Dread Wolf’s head snaps up, eyes blown wide and black, and Merrill waits neither for reply nor retaliation. She steps backwards into the eluvian and with a last whisper, she leaves the Vir Dirthara behind.

“Dirthara-ma, Fen’Harel.”

**Author's Note:**

>  _Dirthara-ma_ = May you learn (Used as a curse; and according to Solas it's "the greatest curse of my people.")
> 
> Yes, this is the version of DA:I where Merrill and Morrigan joined the inquisition after the events at the Winter Palace, and Merrill was the one to drink from the well of sorrows. Because come the fuck on Bioware, you have an elvish eluvian expert basically on a silver platter and you go with the human instead? For shame. Also, [this post](http://dgcatanisiri.tumblr.com/post/107140706607/consider-this-morrigan-and-merrill-coming-across) is a really nice illustration of how that partnership between Morrigan and Merrill could come to pass.


End file.
